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Syllable division and stress derived from spelling — this word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so no phonetic transcription is shown rather than a guessed one.
holism is a noun meaning "the theory that the parts of any whole cannot exist and cannot be understood except in their relation to the whole". It carries one recorded sense.
the theory that the parts of any whole cannot exist and cannot be understood except in their relation to the whole
“holism holds that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
“holistic theory has been applied to ecology and language and mental states”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for holism come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.